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PREMISE TO “FACT A”: “One of the central assumptions behind the significance of "Fact A" to SETI is that any spacecraft arriving in the solar system would result in the permanent settlement of the Earth.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

FERMI PARADOX. “A particularly trenchant formulation of this inconsistency is that of Hart (1975), who dubs the fact that there are not aliens on Earth now "Fact A." This fact is supposedly surprising because the time for an exponentially growing population to travel to every star in the Galaxy under even rather conservative assumptions of the feasibility of interstellar travel is short compared to the age of the Galaxy. Many have used this and similar articulations of the Fermi Paradox to argue that the entire endeavor of SETI is a "waste of time".” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

PREMISE: WE HAVE BARELY LOOKED. “Tarter et al. and others have argued strongly to the contrary: bright and obvious radio beacons might be quite common in the sky, but we would not know it yet because our search completeness to date is so low, akin to having searched a drinking glass's worth of seawater for evidence of fish in all of Earth's oceans.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

PREMISE: WE HAVE SEARCHED FAR AND WIDE. “Many articulations of the Fermi Paradox have as a premise, implicitly or explicitly, that humanity has searched for signs of extraterrestrial radio transmissions and concluded that there are few or no obvious ones to be found.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

ABOUT SAND AND OSTRICHES. The cumulative funding in the entire history of humanity to conduct a thorough, serious, effort to search for life in the universe is under $200 million, or flying a single F-22 Raptor military jet for about one and a half months. Stephen Hawking: “In an infinite Universe, there must be other life. There is no bigger question. It is time to commit to finding the answer.” https://lnkd.in/dfV6qM9 View in LinkedIn

SEARCH NULLS. “Searches for first examples of hypothesized physical phenomena proceed through a series of progressively stringent null results. The thoroughness and speed of a search are typically quantified by parameterizing the search space and calculating the volume explored.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

SIZE OF THE TASK. “Quantifying the amount of searching that has been done should help to dispel this misconception. Tarter et al. (2010), for instance, have estimated that ruling out the existence of radio beacons based on the amount of searching to date is akin to basing one's opinion on the existence of marine life on dipping a single drinking glass into the ocean and seeing if it contains a fish.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

PULL-THE-PLUGGERS. “Perceptions to the contrary abound, as many authors use the "failure" of SETI to date as evidence that we should stop looking, that we need to move to new search strategies, or that we should reevaluate the fundamental assumptions of the field.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn